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… is from page 189 of former Caltech physics professor and provost – and former Energy Department undersecretary during the Obama administration – Steven Koonin’s excellent 2021 book, Unsettled? What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters [2]:
Trust in scientific institutions underpins our ability – and the ability of the media and politicians as well – to trust what is presented to us as The Science. Yet when it comes to climate, those institutions frequently seem more concerned with making the science fit a narrative than with ensuring the narrative fits the science.
DBx: In this book Koonin documents the unsettling – and even to me surprising – extent to which well-credentialed scientists and scientific institutions are either so astonishingly careless with facts and reasoning that they get basic matters backwards, or are so intoxicated by pre-conceived notions that they believe themselves to be justified in telling falsehoods and half-truths.
And there’s every reason to believe that the same pernicious, anti-scientific forces that are at work to misrepresent what the science actually says about the climate and climate policy are at work also to misrepresent what the science actually says about covid and covid policy.